The Business Bytes
TBB BUREAU
GABON (AFRICA)/BHUBANESWAR, APR 29, 2023
CSM Tech, an Indian IT consulting company with an active business footprint in Africa, has signed a multi-million dollar contract with the Ministry of Economy and Recovery in Gabon, for implementation of a timber traceability solution and an electronic timber trade platform for the Ministry.
The agreement was signed by Nicole Jeanine Lydie Roboty Mbou, Minister for Economy and Recovery, Gabon and Priyadarshi Nanu Pany, Founder & CEO of CSM Tech.
The project was kicked off recently by the Minister for Waters & Forests (Gabon) Professor Lee White.
“We are delighted to bag this opportunity and develop this one-stop, seamless digital solution for the Gabon government. This traceability platform will set new benchmarks in the transparent and sustainable timber trade. It will open up access to global markets for Gabon’s finished wood products. Also, it will ease timber trade for domestic and export markets while strengthening the government’s oversight over log movement and transactions. This milestone project deal will also throw open digital business opportunities in West Africa and Francophone countries,” Priyadarshi Nanu Pany, Founder & CEO of CSM Tech.
The project aims at the digital transformation of existing forest and business operations, ensuring sustainable forest management through digitalization and end-to-end tracking of all administrative and technical activities. The digital platform aims at transparency in transactions, rooting out illegal timber harvest and ensuring environmental sustainability by cutting Greenhouse emissions. Further, the platform is designed to perform forecasts in timber provenance for 20 years, CSM Tech said in a statement.
Gabon is a predominantly forest nation where timber is the crucial export item after oil and manganese and accounting for 9 per cent of the export share by value.
With its ability to collate, consolidate and validate logging operations even in remote forest locations, the digital platform developed by CSM Tech caters to both state and non-state actors – Concessionaire, Government, Contract Loggers, Graders and Logistics Providers.
The introduction of the timber marketplace solution brings in many benefits like plugging revenue leakages, getting over operational inefficacies and setting in new standards for log trading through inventory grading processes. Also, it will create new service revenue opportunities for the Gabon government and SEZ through multiple monetization use cases and integrating the complete ecosystem.
The key modules of the Forest e-Governance Solution (FEG) are Support and Databases, Content Management and Confidentiality, E-Administration, Business and Statistical Data, Mapping, Human Resources, Legality, Finance and Taxation and Infrastructure & Logistics.
The project has multi-pronged objectives – provide an online platform for the interaction of investors with all the relevant government agencies, offer a single interface for Investors to apply for all statutory clearances, concessions, and incentives, provide real time status of application through SMS & E-mail to investors, enabling a single window interface for government officials to review the online application and integration of all regulatory compliance & performance reporting, trade data exchange and other information transmission.
